Janet Buck is a gifted, disciplined poet, as readers of
OffCourse know well. Her new collection, Tickets to a Closing
Play, winner of the 2002 Gival Press Poetry Contest, confirms our sense
of her power and skill, and gives us an opportunity to celebrate her continuing
presence among us.

In Tickets, Janet Buck treats bereftness and grief
as blows that strike with terrible but mundane force. After Auden ("Funeral
Blues"), Bishop ("One Art") and Thomas ("Do Not Go Gentle"),
she shows us that the work of mourning never ends, that art does not so
much shield us from the pain of loss as allow us to absorb it. Like an adroit
fencer, she never loses her poise, but calls out "touché"
when hit. Her gaze stays focused, unaverted, on the decay in the persons
(and things) closest to her. In the process, she becomes our surrogate and
champion in the single combat of living and dying. And always she "lets
the words take the lead" (following Mallarmé's dictum).

As with all true poetry, exactly how Janet Buck's verse
achieves its effects remains mysterious. I should nonetheless like to explore
the mystery in her case, by alighting here and there across Tickets to
a Closing Play.

The last two lines of "Upon the Threads of Slivered
Glass" seem to capture Janet Buck's credo as a poet: "Words must
be that olive oil / which floats above this vinegar." Let me venture
a gloss: The intelligible should dress the bitter without diluting it. We
note in passing that the demonstratives "that" and "this"
keep everything in the particular, the realm that lyric poetry quits at
its peril. Also, we can hear (feel) a four-beat line, possibly the poet's
favorite meter, so appropriate for the tone of practical resignation that
pervades her work.

Occasionally, Janet Buck's line rolls past the span of
a sigh, as in the opening stanza of "Tumbleweeds on Desert Floors":
"When you died, my sister and I flipped a grimy nickel / to decide
which of our salt-stoned cheeks / would tackle the stash of memories / huddled
in darkness under your bed. / I lost." In rubato style, the quick coda
("I lost") effectively realigns the stanza with the rhythm of
the whole poem (and of the whole collection), while reprising the dominant
theme of loss.

Elsewhere, one line, like the first in "Swelling
Walls," conveys a world of meaning: "Death alters the size of
a house." It would be hard to imagine a more graphic yet more oblique
statement of death's impact on those nearest the departed one. ("Tell
all the truth but tell it slant," Emily Dickinson commands and Janet
Buck heeds.) At other moments, a striking image, like the following one
from "Sharp Ice," hints at rivers of regret: "Too young to
abide the wrinkling fruit, / I wasn't prepared for the rind." Or, from
"Final Picnics," this one: "At the edge of a grave, / even
the desert looks green."

Loss, with consequent bereavement, is shadowed in Tickets
by a sporadic meditation on the inadequacy of any expression of that
twofold notion. The secondary theme extends and deepens the primary one.
In "The Closet," sisters, at once little girls and grown women,
stare into a parent's closet after a funeral. Whose funeral it is doesn't
matter. What matters is the raw experience of primal lack, including of
the words sufficient for rendering the lack. Along with the sisters, we
see a colon, but no words for the space after the punctuation mark. A parent
is gone for good; nothing more will issue from that quarter. "The Closet"
ends: "He stands in perfumed oceans / of dresses and robes /
a colon perched / ahead of no phrase."

We are drawn now to another site of stored-away clothes
(and memories), the last lines of the last poem in Tickets, "Carving
a Map." Art may constitute weak medicine, flimsy cover, only a dubious
whiff of protection, but it's what lingers after we outlive someone (or
something) essential to us: "A poem smells like / mothballs killing
lavender, / but it's all I have for the scent. / This page, this sweater
with holes."

In "Chore of Mace," the poet, as in a dream,
simultaneously has climbed a flight of stairs, forged a life and built a
poem, futile if necessary activities all. Fragments of remembrance, imagination
and perception swirl around her, enter her orbit. She merges with her instrument.
Indeed, the words of the poem take the lead. Everything is somehow resolved,
albeit darkly, in the dense concluding lines, almost an envoi: "So
this is how it really feels / to handle sonnets in the raw, / then emerge
as lifeless prose / aware the rhyme and ligature / float in buckets
of a grave."

In a entirely positive sense, Tickets to Closing Play
is one long poem, an elegant dirge in which the olive oil of art floats
above, but not apart from, the vinegar of life.